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Quickly and easily "sanitize" computer before sale

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Post April 26th, 2009, 8:40 am

Besides formatting the hard drive and removing everything, is there an easy way to clean out all saved documents & other files (but not programs), user accounts & passwords, cookies, preferences, settings, printers & etc., etc. for a (ex-business) computer that is to be sold? XP Pro SP2
Thanks!
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Post April 26th, 2009, 8:40 am

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Post April 28th, 2009, 3:15 pm

I'm afraid there's no way to do that. It is possible to overwrite all of those data on the hdd several times, making it clean that way. But there's also similar but older data on the hdd, only it might have been deleted already and thus there will be no 'link' to the data on the hdd anymore and therefore that older data won't be securely deleted.

So best way is to do a low level format, securely deleting every single piece of data on the hdd.
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Post April 28th, 2009, 4:31 pm

tweakui can do some of that.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Down ... rtoys.mspx

The download link is on the right.
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